From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Apr 10 18:23:28 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA17237 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 10 Apr 1997 18:23:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from panda.hilink.com.au (panda.hilink.com.au [203.2.144.5]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA17231 for ; Thu, 10 Apr 1997 18:23:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from danny@localhost) by panda.hilink.com.au (8.8.5/8.7.3) id LAA26961; Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:28:45 +1000 (EST) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:28:44 +1000 (EST) From: "Daniel O'Callaghan" To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: on the subject of changes to -RELEASEs... In-Reply-To: <199704110021.JAA07339@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Michael Smith wrote: > Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying: > > > how about making these "well known" files such as /etc/resolv.conf, > > > /etc/host.conf and other stuff symlinks into /var/etc ? This is > > NOOO! I just nuked my SCO ODT partition; I do _not_ want to play "you > are in a maze of twisty symlinks, all different" again for a _long_ > time. This might sound like a super hack, but given all of the other suggestions in this thread, I'll throw it in for consideration. I wanted to set up a machine with ro / and /usr. Because unionfs does not work well (and I'm not hacker enough to fix it, or I would consider it) I made a small /etc partition which can be mounted rw. At boot time, wd0a:/etc/rc execs wd0a:/boot/rc.boot wd0a:/boot/rc.boot mounts wd0s1e on /etc and execs wd0a:/etc/rc.continue If /etc fails to mount, wd0a:/etc is used to boot into an emergency mode which has enough stuff in it to log into our terminal server, and send mail to me, so I can telnet in and fix the dirty filesystems. It has saved me an hour's drive to the customer's site a couple of times. (Customer pulls plug on their gateway to use the vacuum cleaner or something.) Now this is a *real* headache, but if init started its boot process from wd0a:/boot/rc which mounted /etc and continued, the headache would be less, and read-only / would move close to reality. Danny